I like food a lot, and today is one of, if not the premier food event across the United States. Standard, not metric, tons of Turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, potato, and pumpkin pie will be made and consumed today, to go with cider and adult beverages. I like all of these things, and even have a soft spot for the traditional fare, which is sometimes derided as boring. After that preface, however, I must admit that I am not particularly fond of Thanksgiving, and not because of its historical connotations. In part, I don’t have the facilities to host and while there are some friends in town, family and other friends are scattered from coast to coast, so my interest in the day is somewhat muted. Yet have a more philosophical opposition to specific gluttonous days: rather than a single day to eat well and eat too much, would it not be better to eat well and to satiety every day? Time is precious, but good food is worth it, and my ideal is to host gatherings [see the above limitations] with more frequency.

On this Thanksgiving day, I have the added limitation of having just gotten back from a trip to Minneapolis, and am therefore laying low–cleaning, baking, and generally putting things back together. More than that, I didn’t get to spend enough time writing on this particular trip, and (in so doing) realized that what I really want to do is to spend time working on my dissertation. I also fully intend to spend Black Friday the same thing.

There is a risk that publicly acknowledging thanks on a dedicated day implies that one need not do so any other day, but I think it is still worth doing so. In the macro level, I am thankful for my health, my loved ones, including friends and family. More specifically, though, I am thankful that I still really enjoy my research and am still getting an opportunity to read and write for my job (as much as I am looking forward to getting back to teaching).

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I hope to write more here, but between job applications, dissertation, teaching, and the various protests that have taken place at the University of Missouri, it has been a busy several months.

Back near the start of October I decided to challenge myself by reading Dostoevsky’s Demons, in part because I have yet to successfully grind through one of those long Russian novels, having abandoned Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace part way through. I have more trouble with Russian translations than with a lot of other languages, and will readily admit I sometimes struggle to keep tabs on who is doing what when there are multiple ways of addressing each character. These are me problems, but I was determined.

Then October happened. The job application process happened, and a whole slew of things I needed to do came up, and a small number of social events sucked what little time I had left. There have been days where wheedling away at a dissertation paragraph has taken the place of opening a book for twenty minutes. It is all rather exhausting and I only managed to get through about a third of Demons. I have not yet given up on it, though, at this point, I might not finish it for another month. I hope not, and if it comes to that I might race through something a little bit lighter before I finish this one.

Anyway, that was my fiction reading for the month of October. Such as it was.

About

Welcome to my blog. Although the host is new, the blog is not--the first post went up in January 2008.
I write about a variety of topics here including, but hardly limited to, baking, books, movies, historical topics, and politics. This is a catchall where I write about whatever I want to write about.